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Written by Steven Ouellette
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Don't judge a gauge by its sticker I seem to be thinking about the measurement phase a lot recently. I suppose it’s because I’ve seen some teams working hard on problems that turned out to be nothing more than problems with measurement. Let me give you an example. |
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Written by Steven Ouellette
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How do you measure up? There is something that will get you into trouble if you don’t know about it, and which in my experience very few Black Belts or even Master Black Belts know about. It’s only in the mind of the person doing the research, and no software program will know about it. This mysterious property is “measurement level,” and that is what I want to talk about this month. |
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Written by Steven Ouellette
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Are you capable? I spent my June and July articles beating up on the “sigma” index commonly associated with Six Sigma (and continue to do so over in my discussion board.) Let me sum up by saying that, while not wrong, “sigma” isn’t an efficient metric for accomplishing what we are trying to do in today’s business environment. Is there a better way to do that? I think that there is, and in this, my lucky 14th Heretic article, it is fitting that we continue to explore ways to measure the effect of Six Sigma. |
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Written by Steven Ouellette
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The Bad and the Ugly Last month I talked about the “sigma” index and how it can be used. So what could be bad about the “sigma” index? Never forget that metrics drive behavior and that people are very, very good at finding a way to succeed when given a goal. It just may not be the thing you wanted them to do. |
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Written by Steven Ouellette
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Shifty Sigma Now that we have talked about defining Six Sigma and 10 stupid Six Sigma tricks, I’ll move on to the measure phase and discuss some things that work and don’t work in measuring the effect of Six Sigma. The new metric that Six Sigma brought to us was the sigma index, so let’s start with it. Whenever I refer to this index, I will write out “sigma” and put scare quotes around it. This will get tiresome, but this is necessary to differentiate it from the statistical term for standard deviation. I’ll tell you up front that I’m not a big fan of the sigma index for a couple of reasons, which I promise I’ll get to. But first, what is “sigma”? This is a bit convoluted, I warn you. |
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This article was originally published in InsideSixSigma, a bi-weekly online newsletter published by Quality Digest.
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Six Sigma Heretic
